Ask Lemmygrad

Lately I've been going with some variant of this (not that it comes up often):

Accusations against Stalin, when they're not totally ahistorical black book of communism double genocide theory nonsense, always focus on specific things he did like using secret police. The problem is, secret police are not an inherently good or evil thing, they are simply one of the tools in the toolbox of a 20th century government.

Consider our own. We have a dozen different organizations in our government that would absolutely qualify as "secret police" under any reasonable definition, but we always describe them euphemistically. "Plainclothes officers", "Intelligence Agents", etc. We do this because we are taught that the incredible violence done by certain states to pursue their goals is legitimate, and that the same violence done by other states to perpetuate their goals is not.

What separates states is not the methods by which they did things, but the goals and results of those methods. Stalin's government, for all of its mistakes, by and large perpetuated violence against the previous ruling class in order to promote equality and progress. The kulaks were not an ethnic minority that were targeted out of irrational hatred the way that fascists were targeting Jews at the same time, they were capitalists who owned everything and hoarded wealth and who needed to be dispossessed of that wealth in order for the Soviet peasants to be freed from their generational poverty and economic repression.

To take a totally random example here, New York Mayor Mamdani currently has a policy of taking away land from slum lords. He has proven to be more willing to do this than previous New York mayors, and his policy is inherently backed by the threat of violence by the NYPD against any slum lord that resists. Stalin was that person in his context and at a much larger scale, and was willing to cast a much wider net in order to achieve his goal more quickly - which we can argue about whether that was a mistake, because it got innocents caught in it, but we cannot argue was an inherently progressive, egalitarian goal which produced incredible results - the elimination of extreme poverty, and the defeat of fascism.